A wire harness is a bundle of wires that can be handled as an element and can be easily installed to interconnect components of various electrical and electronic systems. The shape of a wire harness is dictated by the environment for the harness and the particular location of connections for the harness. Accordingly, a wire harness often includes one or more bends, and branches for routing various wire segments of the harness to their corresponding connection points.
A harness often includes 50 or more wires, each uniquely terminated and uniquely positioned. It is important that each wire extend from a predetermined position on one connector to the corresponding position on a second connector. Bends must be formed into each wire during lay up or the final product will not be satisfactory.
When done manually, the wire is cut to length after being inserted into the originating connectors and being laid up in the necessary path. Each wire must be identified so that the technician can place the correct wire in the correct contact of the connector. Even for simple harnesses, the task is Herculean, making the manual assembly of wire harnesses extremely labor intensive.
Robotics in manufacturing has recently lead to research and development of robotic systems for assembling wire harnesses. To achieve robotized assembly, special tools for handling the wire had to be developed, since the lengths of wire were difficult to handle without some precise control. While robots can move in predefined paths, they are not intelligent and cannot make even rather minor course corrections. Therefore, the tools necessarily had to be designed to overcome the variations that would undoubtedly occur so that the preciseness of the robot motion could still be utilized.